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Tag: FIFA

Some of us watched the re­cently con­cluded FIFA World cup dur­ing un­godly hours with dreary eyes. Some of you might have wondered on the defin­i­tion this kind of fun – a bunch of guys run af­ter one ball where­as every­one could have been given one each.

Whichever camp you be­long to, there is a lot one can learn from these past 4 weeks of soc­cer ac­tion:

Phillipp Lahm, the German cap­tain sum­mar­ized the vic­tory rather well with a one lin­er para­phrased here “oth­ers have mar­quee play­ers, we have a team.” If you pon­der over this line from him, it is evid­ent that des­pite huge dif­fer­ences in in­di­vidu­al abil­it­ies, each mem­ber of the team has a role to play. If you build your strategy too much around 1 play­er, you still may not get close to your goal (well, pun in­ten­ded). If you do not be­lieve this, ask Argentina, Portugal, Brazil and so on… (Teams need to identi­fy and strengthen on the col­lect­ive team’s cap­ab­il­it­ies.)

You can be in love with what you do, but not to a point of ex­clu­sion of some real­it­ies. Passion is a key in­gredi­ent, but too much of this could break your back. Ask Brazil, it will be a while be­fore they can keep their back straight, sadly, too lit­er­ally for their main play­er. It is OK to build a sta­di­um by spend­ing your tax payer’s money hop­ing that your team will play there (and be­come cham­pi­ons), but not without giv­ing al­low­ance for un­desir­able out­comes. Run with pas­sion, but hold on to a grain of truth to guide you. (Keep our head bal­anced and eyes straight on tasks, but do make al­low­ance for real­it­ies too)

It is not over, till it is over. USA was all ready for an up­set of Portugal, but for a goal from Portugal in the 91st minute (yes, in the dy­ing seconds of the game). USA sup­port­ers may have star­ted to rev­el on the spoils of this vic­tory, when they were shut out with this goal. (No work is com­pete till all pos­sible ex­pos­ures are plugged)

Size or skill may not mat­ter much without self be­lief. Minnows of Group D (Costa Rica) topped their group. They also ex­tin­guished the Greek flame and al­most send Netherlands pack­ing. Their dis­play of soc­cer was not just repu­ta­tion in mo­tion, but am­bi­tion and skill on a bed rock of cour­age. You can be God in your chosen pro­fes­sion, but without cour­age you can­not seize the day. See England, Uruguay and Italy – they were out of sorts with Costa Rica – a na­tion who does not even have an army! (Courage the vir­tue on which all oth­er vir­tues are moun­ted)

Finally, know­ing data helps. Germans stud­ied them­selves and the com­pet­i­tion closely – they im­proved their ball hand­ling time from 3.4 secs to 1.1 secs. Imagine the power of this, each mem­ber of the team knows that they need to speed up. Everyone speeds up a bit, the en­tire team speeds up hugely. (A small act of ef­fi­ciency by each team mem­ber goes a long way for the team).

We could go on with more ex­amples. Key point be­ing it was not just a soc­cer tour­na­ment, but an epi­tome of strategy and ex­e­cu­tion. Lot can be learnt from this.

Yes. You read that right. Those were the res­ults of our ex­plor­a­tion of the physique of teams which par­ti­cip­ated at the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

Tall & Short Tales

Each team had a squad of 23 play­ers. Each bar here rep­res­ents a team, the height of the bar is the av­er­age height of play­ers in the team and the width of the bar in­dic­ates the av­er­age weight. Lets start off by ar­ran­ging the teams based on their av­er­age height.

In the 2014 World Cup the Germans were the tallest with an av­er­age height of 1.86 m and also the heav­iest weigh­ing 79.35 kilos on av­er­age.

Mia Hamm the American World Cup Soccer cham­pi­on said,

“If a team wants to in­tim­id­ate you phys­ic­ally and you let them, they’ve won.”

It was not just their in­tim­id­at­ing physique but also their su­per­i­or skill and team work that helped the Germans win the World Cup. They were the per­fect com­bin­a­tion of ‘brain’ & ‘brawn’, de­mol­ish­ing any­thing that came their way.

The play­ers from Chile were the shortest with an av­er­age height of 1.76 m.

And the play­ers from Japan were the light­est weigh­ing 71.43 kgs. Mexico was close at 71.65 kgs.

European Domination

Amongst the tallest teams, the first 5 were all European! – Germany, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Belgium, Croatia & England. Spain was the shortest and light­est of the European teams.

South America

The South American teams were at the bot­tom half, Brazil be­ing the tallest of the lot with an av­er­age height of 1.82 m.

North America

With the ex­cep­tion of the United States (1.83 m) the oth­er North American teams – Costa Rica, Honduras & Mexico – were among­st the shortest.

Africa & Asia

The African & Asian teams fill the rest of the gap. The Super Eagles (1.83m) were the tallest African team

while South Korea (1.84m) was the tallest Asian team.

A European Phenomenon?

Let’s ar­range the teams by or­der of Average Weight and study the Europeans. Out of the 6 teams in the bot­tom half, with the ex­cep­tion of transcon­tin­ent­al Russia, 5 are Western European – Portugal, Italy, France, the Netherlands & Spain. Note: Teams are now ordered by Average Weight.

BMI Scores

Arranging the teams based on their av­er­age BMI scores we find that Cameroon has the highest mean BMI score of 23.67 and Russia and Japan the lowest at 22.58.

The Giants & Giant Killers

Lets now move on to the play­ers them­selves. Who were the tallest, shortest, heav­iest & light­est play­ers in the 2014 World Cup?

Fraser Forster, the English Goal Keeper was the tallest stand­ing tall at an as­ton­ish­ing 2.01 m.

Edgar Salli, the Cameroon for­ward was the shortest play­er at 1.63 m.

In most teams it was either a goal­keep­er or a de­fend­er who was the tallest or heav­iest. But there were also ex­cep­tions. Notice that a for­ward was the tallest play­er in these teams – Chile (Mauricio Pinilla), France (Olivier Giroud), South Korea (Shin-Wook Kim) & Portugal (Hugo Miguel Pereira de Almeida ) – while a mid­field­er(Reza Haghighi) was the tallest play­er in the Iranian team.

Tallest play­er by po­s­i­tion

The tallest play­ers of France, South Korea & Portugal (all for­wards) also happened to be the heav­iest in their teams while a for­ward from Italy (Mario Balotelli ) and an­other from Chile(Jean Beausejour) were the heav­iest in their re­spect­ive teams.

Heaviest play­er by po­s­i­tion

Before we go, who do you think won the 2010 slug­fest? Germany? Wrong! It was the Serbians! Gotcha!

Like this:

In case you are won­der­ing what just happened, you’ve just been ‘Blitzkrieged’ .

‘Blitzkrieg’ is a German term which means ‘light­ning war’; a war con­duc­ted with great speed and for­ce. You may want to read a bit about this World War phe­nomen­on of ours here, to really un­der­stand what happened on the 8th of July 2014.

You can take com­fort in the fact that we haven’t done this for the first time. In fact, ‘Blitzkrieg’ to us is a habit …

Please see the im­age be­low for our rich ‘blitzkrieg’ his­tory.

We’ve been look­ing for a big one, and thanks for ac­cept­ing the in­vit­a­tion.